Are workers trading down?

Retraining can’t keep up with flood of jobs lost overseas

By Steve Law

The Portland Tribune, Jul 22, 2010, Updated Jul 23, 2010 (10 Reader comments)

Christopher Onstott / Portland Tribune

Daryl Payne (left) and Carl Liesegamg work out a math problem during an Algebra class at Clackamas Community College, part of their retraining for new careers. The two former Daimler Trucks employees are among the 10,000 Oregon workers whose jobs have been lost in the past year due to free-trade pacts.

Those who preach the gospel of free trade say it will lift the whole world’s economy, from rich nations to poor.

And, they say, if American workers lose jobs to workers overseas or cheap imports, they can get retraining — courtesy of the federal Trade Act — to learn higher-skilled jobs for the 21st Century.

Forty-year-old Daryl Payne lost a production technician job at Daimler Trucks on Swan Island when the German company shifted manufacturing to Mexico. Uncle Sam is now paying him to learn how to be a water-treatment technician.

Lake Oswego resident Mitch Besser, 48, lost his job as a software engineer for a Nevada casino company when it shifted operations to Beijing. Now, he hopes the government retraining program will pay him to study bioinformatics at Oregon Health & Science University.

Trade Act benefits are a lifeline for displaced workers at a time when replacement jobs are scarce.

“The economy is going to be turning around eventually,” says Bob Tackett, executive secretary-treasurer of the Northwest Labor Council in Portland. “This is a good time to train yourself up.”

But even supporters of the program say it’s not enough to offset the jobs being lost as Oregon’s manufacturing and high-tech base is dismantled due to free-trade pacts.

“This is just a Band-Aid on a large wound,” Tackett says.

In the past year, the U.S. Labor Department certified 10,902 Oregon workers as eligible for retraining and other Trade Adjustment Assistance because they lost jobs due to free-trade pacts, according to data compiled by the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign. The campaign’s director, Arthur Stamoulis, says those lost jobs are evidence that unfair trade policies, not just a sour economy, are partly to blame for Oregon’s stubbornly high unemployment.

If the sole reason for Oregon’s huge job losses is the recession, says Greg Pallesen, vice president of Portland-based Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers, then why is China booming right now?

In some ways, Pallesen says, the Trade Act was designed to mollify Congressional and citizen fears that free-trade policies would sacrifice too many American jobs. “It sounds terrible, but I almost believe this country would have been better off if the Trade Act had never passed.”

Benefits expanded

The Trade Act of 1974 was designed to help retrain blue-collar manufacturing workers displaced by competition from cheap imports. The program was expanded in 2002 — timed with the new North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA — to aid workers whose jobs were shipped overseas. The program was expanded again last year to include white-collar and service workers.

“It’s a great program,” Daryl Payne says. Workers can get extended unemployment benefits, health insurance subsidies and two years’ tuition for retraining if the Oregon Employment Department finds there are available jobs in the worker’s chosen new field.

But now, even stalwart Portland-area employers such as Tektronix, the granddaddy of the local technology sector, are shipping jobs overseas. That raises a troubling question for area workers and young adults pondering their future education: Just what is a secure job to shoot for these days?

There’ll always be toilets

As Payne notes, even X-rays are being sent to India so lower-paid X-ray technicians can interpret them.

But he figures you can’t offshore toilets, and local workers always will be needed in the water treatment field. So he enrolled in a two-year program at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City to learn a new trade.

Payne worked 15 years for Daimler as a production technician and doing quality assurance on the truck assembly line. He was laid off in early 2009, and got temporary work counseling fellow laid-off workers about Trade Act benefits.

Of 180 workers laid off in his group, only 85 signed up for any Trade Act benefits, Payne says. Of those, at least 40 sought retraining benefits, though some left their studies when Daimler called them back to their jobs.

Program’s limits

Many displaced workers don’t even bother to come to orientation meetings to learn about Trade Act benefits. “They’re mad at the world,” says Mark Warne, who helps link workers to the program as a work force liaison for the Oregon AFL-CIO labor federation in Portland.

Some workers can’t afford to live on unemployment insurance while going back to school, even if the government pays their tuition and 80 percent of health insurance benefits. That’s not enough to make house payments and pay children’s college tuition, especially if their spouse isn’t working, Warne says.

“A lot of them are intimidated about going back to school,” especially older workers, Pallesen says.

Some Daimler workers were tripped up by federal and health insurance paperwork issues, Payne says, and were denied benefits.

And the federal government is sometimes slow to certify that laid-off workers lost their jobs due to trade pacts. It took 18 months for workers at Weyerhaeuser’s Albany trucking division to qualify for benefits, Warne says. By then, many had moved on.

Some companies resist filing for Trade Act benefits for their laid-off workers. “A lot of companies don’t want anything to do with it,” says Tackett, who previously had Warne’s job. Unions or a minimum of three workers at an affected work site can file for benefits, but it takes longer without the employer’s cooperation.

Payne figures he’ll make out better than most of his peers. He couldn’t handle going to college while he was working full time, but now has time to focus on his studies.

He’s noticing that three or four job openings crop up each month in his intended new field. Though there are 50 to 80 applicants for each job, he’s confident about his prospects.

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit